Along with Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Grade was the other great postwar Yiddish writer, the one whom few people outside
scholarly circles have ever heard of. And for that, some people blame his widow.

For more than two decades after her husband’s death in 1982, Inna Hecker Grade cantankerously repulsed almost all efforts
to translate or publish his work or sort his papers.

But Inna Grade died on May 2 at 85, and now the contents of the couple’s book-cluttered apartment in the Bronx might soon
be opened to scholars and publishers. Because Inna Grade died without a will or survivors, the Bronx public administrator
is charged with overseeing her estate. Four institutions have been invited to examine her husband’s papers and determine their
literary and monetary value.

“This is our thrilling moment in Yiddish literature; this is our Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Aaron Lansky, president of the Yiddish
Book Center in Amherst, Mass., which collects thousands of Yiddish books and distributes them to libraries.

Chaim Grade grew up in Vilna, now Vilnius, the intellectually vibrant “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” He studied in yeshivas but
grew disenchanted with Orthodox Judaism and wrote poetry as part of a fabled Yiddish literary circle, Yung Vilne.

When the Nazis occupied Vilna, he fled east and was to learn that his first wife and mother perished. He met Inna Hecker,
and in 1948 they immigrated to New York, where he made a living as a riveting lecturer and writer serialized in Yiddish newspapers.

Several works were translated into English. The two-volume novel
The Yeshiva explores a headmaster’s painful struggles with faith and morality. The memoir
My Mother’s Sabbath Days poignantly recalls his widowed mother, who peddled fruit to survive in Vilna; his ordeals of flight in Stalin’s Soviet Union;
and the desolation he felt upon finding Jewish Vilna destroyed and coming across haunting remnants such as a pediatrician’s
scale.
Rabbis and Wives is a collection of three novellas. But most of his prewar poetry is untranslated.

John Gross, in a 1986 review of the memoir, called him a “poet with a firm grip on reality.” Some critics thought his austere
portrayals more authentically reflected Eastern European life than Singer’s did, but Singer, with a leprechaunish charm that
leavened his bleakest stories, appealed more to American audiences.

“He played to the galleries and learned how to handle his readership,” Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse said. “That was not Grade’s
style.”

Perhaps as a consequence, Grade never achieved the popularity among English-language readers that Singer did.

Scholars say Grade’s wife maintained a fierce conviction that almost no translator could do him justice.

“This is all about possession,” said writer Cynthia Ozick, who has translated Grade’s poetry. “It’s a kind of greed, a kind
of hoarding greed.”